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The Radical - Dispatch

This month's theme · Utopias of the Everyday

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The Radical Commons is now accepting submissions for the inaugural issue of Radical Dispatches. The point of this endeavour is to build the utopia. TRC wants to be another drop in a global ocean of resistance: resistance to the fascist winter that is upon us, resistance to the zombie capitalism that wants to grind our spines. Utopia as a horizon within reach. Where every possible still exists. We refuse to wait on the sidelines for it. The world is not dying. THIS world is dying, and we're celebrating. It means we get a shot to build on the ashes. We didn't choose this collapse, but we refuse to be silent bystanders while what comes next gets imagined and built: a world on our own terms. Building a world means bringing together an aggregate of humans: their ideas, their labor, their care for each other. That world, still on the horizon we can just make out in the distance, is already pressing into the present, carried by the voices and actions of people across the globe. Not-yet-here but already here, to borrow Ernst Bloch's phrase.

In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes: "We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport. We must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds." This becomes possible through a queer aesthetic, where artists create and enact the then and there of new, unbounded worlds. Muñoz calls the aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, a place that "frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-drawing futurity." Endings and beginnings rarely come with clean timelines. In an era this murky, death and new life move in tango. The world as we've known it is putting up one hell of a fight, refusing to disappear without turning into an atrocious sight of suffering and disaster along the way. And the new world is struggling to be born under all that weight. Homage, not spectacle, to the survival mechanisms of people this godforsaken world has battered. What we're after is the anticipatory trace, the latent presence of what's coming. Tactics built to trick a dying system, to slip past its suffocating logic, imbued with love, care, and an imagination that defies the limits of the feasible. Tactics rooted in land and kinship. These tactics are evidence of a will, an imagination already reaching for something better, not just instruments that get the job done. Muñoz calls these the "blueprints" of a better future: hidden inside art, performance, everyday acts of radical hope. We want to gather them like seeds and carry them forward. Send us the essays, photo essays, videos, documentaries, audions, collages, illustrations, poetry or fiction. Deadline: October 1, 2026. Word counts, formats, languages, and anonymity, everything else you need to know, is in the FAQ below.

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